Christopher Wei

This is an interactive robotic painting machine that paints by itself, listening to its own noises to determine what to do next, or by listening to the input through a microphone. It takes this input noise and does some FFT on it and uses this data to make decisions of where to paint and how much pressure to apply and what color to use, etc. There is something really strange about a machine that paints with such deliberation but is mostly entirely random. It has no sense of what it is painting or what the sounds that it is hearing even mean and yet it makes such deliberate and precise strokes that only a machine could make and that sort of fascinates me. This work explores the ideas of our relationship to machinery today and prods at the question of whether, since the artist made it, the art that is created by the machine is really the artist’s art. The feedback loop parallels how human artists develop their work when in isolation and when the in presence of others. I am skeptical about the whole artist’s art or machine’s art sort of idea, but just the aesthetics and the kinda creepy sounds the machine makes while painting is enough to intrigue me.